These codes are used to track ailments and related health issues which include chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart diseases, contagious diseases like norovirus, flu and athletes foot. These procedures are useful to the development of public health programs, private insurance company policy development and in workers compensation carrier.
These classification identities are used in most areas of medicine, pharmacies, in public health as well as informatics analysis in medicine . They include statistical analysis of diseases, therapy reactions, reimbursement of diagnostic groups, decisions for support systems and surveillance on epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. Basically, the main classes in classification systems are the country specific standards and international standards.
The statistical classification system puts similar clinical concerns into specific categories. This coding is limited in order to a small size in order to prompt easy and quick mastery. Statistical methods are used in international statistical grouping of diseases and general health concerns. For instance, circulatory diseases are all placed in chapter ix and are coded as 100 to 199.There are precise categories such as supra-ventricular tachycardia under which we also have concepts such as auricular tachycardia, nodal tachycardia and proximal junction tachycardia. Another distinguishing feature is seen in the provision of unspecified conditions that are absent in any particular category. A special feature of the statistical method is that it contains provision of residual categories for other unspecified conditions.
In a nomenclature system, there exists separate lists and codes for every clinical concept in health. Considering the previous example, each of the listed tachycardia bears its own code. Thus, in this respect, nomenclature is regarded as ineffective in compiling health statistics.
The types of coding methods as discussed include diagnostic codes generally used in determination of disorders, diseases and symptoms which may be used to determine morbidity and death, pharmaceutical codes which identify medications, procedural codes that are the alphanumeric codes or numbers used to identify given health interventions undertaken by medical professionals and topographical codes that indicate a precise location in the body.
The world health organization gives several globally adopted classification designs to provide surveillance on health data for the population with regard to time and compiling national data in a consistent manner.
Healthcare coding is growing rampantly in the health industry and the demand for coders is very high. In most countries, this job is plentiful and the salaries mostly start at $30000 a year. Anyone considering to join a career in this particular healthcare line must have the two main basics of the field, education and certification. In addition, aspirants competence and preciseness are two qualities that would give one an upper hand in the job
An upcoming trend is outsourcing coding tasks to third parties. As technology evolves day by day, coding platforms will emerge and the outsourcing model will become more established in the industry.